Intellect is what Jacques Barzun calls the social force that moves outwards from those people and activities and forms and habits of the mind. It is distinct from intelligence or intellectuals themselves, being the social product of those things. It is the whole range of institutions and thinkers which give the mind vitality and direction in civilisation - by which Barzun, for all intents and purposes, means western civilisation.
Intellect is the link between knowledge and action, the sort of “direct, responsible judgement” (245) that lets us see many elements, impressions, objects, and ideas in a tangible reality. It shows us which desires are worthy goals. It safeguards “the living minutes” from trumperies and quackeries, would-be science and new religion. And in “the impulse of art and religion, the love of colour and shape, song and storytelling”, it makes life on this rugged planet liveable.
Because Intellect is a social phenomenon, it is like a house, being fundamentally constructed and therefore in need of maintenance and upkeep. If not looked after, it will collapse.
Writing in 1959, Barzun saw Intellect being undermined by “art”, “science”, and “philanthropy” - these I put in quotes because Barzun is not criticising art, science, and philanthropy, only stating that they have their proper realms and work best when they have a healthy respect for each other. Life, as a whole, is far broader than any one of those things. Barzun readily admits that. Dealing in generalities and abstractions, Intellect can only “take notes on the unstoppable flux”, while life “convinces by throbbing in your veins or panting in your face.” (163, 168).
This undermining was happening in public conduct, in private manners, in conversation, in the raising of children, and in the changing purpose of schooling - especially higher education, in which Barzun was involved for many years as a professor at Columbia College, New York. These changing norms were echoes of a shift from a hierarchical, elitist, republican civilisation towards one that was liberal and egalitarian, with power and legitimacy issuing from the fickle temperament of democratic mass-man.
For example, intellectual conversation began to be seen as an exchange: “A delivers an opinion while B thinks of the one he will inject as soon as he decently can… we offer a formula and are offered another, but generally go off with our own.” (60). Barzun prefers the ideal of sifting: “to develop tenable positions by alternate statements, objections, modifications, examples, arguments, distinctions, expressed with the aid of the rhetorical arts…” (61).
This change happened because mass man, with his mass education, finds contradiction uneasy. In democratic society there are few universal sources of accepted authority. Each person is left to his own pursuit of meaning. He is therefore morally - totally - responsible for whatever garbage comes out of his mouth, so a good deal of his conversations seek harmony through agreement and anxiously forfend offence.
In political debates, “intellectual forms have been replaced by psychological ploys.” (57). Debates are undermined by an over-sensitivity to conflict: we are “quick to suspect hidden bias, to note an odd turn, to assess unconscious motives in spoken and written words.” (57).
Moreso than in 1959, I would say much of this continues to be true. How many political debates turn around one person trapping another into saying something unconscionable or indefensible? How often do journalists inject themselves into an interview or debate to spring the dreaded “gotcha” on the unprepared politician? Debates are about credibility and public relations, and only secondarily about politics or ideas.
The decline of political discourse is an eternal theme of democracy. Barzun does not feel the need to justify it beyond pointing to the highlight of the 1858 Lincoln-Douglas debate, in which Lincoln and Douglas spoke directly to everyday people for 30-90 minutes at a time about complex moral and constitutional issues like slavery and federalism. I can’t imagine any politician today being able to speak off-the-cuff for that long, not without an army of communications and PR experts behind them. What would Barzun have made of the brawling spectacle that was the Trump-Clinton debates?
Democratic society has abdicated power in many spheres of life. Authority and discipline are intolerable concepts to mass-man, who disavows all hierarchies; power is only to be wielded by faceless bureaucracies, never vested in specific persons.
So we busily discuss, plan, and plot - but never do. Our professional lives are dominated by pseudo-work. Committees and working groups form to discuss problems. Deadlines, goals, and aspirations are set. Political round-tables analyse the hottest takes of the day. Chairs and panels talk around and around and around an issue without ever coming to a definite conclusion. We want services, platforms, forums - intermediate areas that merely convey substance, rather than creating it. The infinite hui is the order of the day.
Authority has also receded from the family. Barzun saw something inevitable - perhaps even admirable - in youth rebellion, but its “proper and useful antagonist” is paternitas, not society. Without this clash, “tortured self-consciousness” cannot give way to “a self-aware reason for living.” hence the phenomenon of juvenile delinquency: “The young enlist and fight, without asking of the ugly world they inherited whether anybody ever received it fresh, perfect, and beautiful.” (81).
In teaching, the loss of authority replaces “instruction” with “education”. This has a more humane, egalitarian, inclusive ring to it, but also demands less. Instruction requires that, by a certain point, the student demonstrates a basic level of competence in their subject: “this you must know, now and forever”. (123). This is not the be-all-end-all, but it is the point at which a student’s professional calling begins. Education, on the other hand, frets about relevance, emphasising methods and what we would today call critical thinking to try and equip students to handle any situation they might encounter in the messy flux of the real world.
I don’t see the dichotomy so starkly. Both kinds of learning - instruction and education - reinforce each other. But I do think Barzun’s broader point - that education has undermined instruction - is a fair one. Curricula are eternally revised, expanded, widened, stuffed with more concepts and learning outcomes. Frameworks, methods, and approaches are preferred to deep study on concrete topics.
Barzun’s point is a simple one: how can education prepare us for the real world better than the real world itself? The academic sphere is for learning academic things. Education is cherished not so much for its promise of spiritual self-emancipation so much as for being the universal pathway to a stable upper-middle-class life.
This merely turns education into an industry. The education system takes teachers and students and money as inputs, and produces graduates as outputs, cranking them out to meet the demand for knowledge workers. Systems of credits and courses and points “permit an education to be made out of interchangeable parts.” (142).
Are schools mere “equalizers of merit”, a lever that society pulls in order to close outcomes or raise incomes? Or are they where students learn the fundamentals and are helped and encouraged towards their calling?
The question is not about kindness, but about instruction: is the school a place of teaching or of psychologizing? Is it to prolong vicariously the parents’ love of innocence and act out their dream of a good society, or is it to impart literacy? And are we to wait till after the PhD to get it? When, finally, is the school to sort out types of mind, and, assuming that all can read, write, and count, enable each kind to acquire the facts and principles relevant to their calling and their tastes? (141).
Barzun has kind words for European-style selection, wherein students are streamed into different kinds of schools based on their affinities. In 1959, the grammar schools were still widespread in England. This was the academic track, but there was also a technical track for more hands-on subjects. Barzun preferred this kind of system to the American one, which has its origin in the need to socialise young boys and girls into good, democratic Americans.
Nowadays grammar schools are seen as vestiges of elitism. I don’t think Barzun would deny the charge of being an elitist; standards are, after all, what allow us to look up to experts with confidence. But he is very clear that Intellect must stay in his own lane. His is a liberal elitism, not a caste of philosopher-kings. The ideal stance on Intellect pushes it in two directions at once, diminishing it socially, but cherishing it personally. So for instance we ought to cleave Intellect from politics, with the tempestuous nations of France and South America being examples of what happens when politicking elevates itself to lofty high regard on the back of big ideas.
Intellect flourishes when it resists the whimsies of temperament and has a healthy disdain for worldly power. But we should not confuse this disdain for Intellect itself, as art has done. Art, writes Barzun, is now “reaction in spite of seeming to be innovation.” It “no longer claims attention for its clear meaning or its particular form, but simply for its general property of being art, which today means denouncing the universal wrong.” (168). This, ironically, is a surrender to worldly forces: it does not turn its back on power, but merely persuades it to serve a different cause.
One view of the humanities begins and ends with the slogan, “the critic and conscience of society.” This is like the artist who tries to wield power through denouncing the universal wrong. It denies any special relevance of the humanities to our inner life, and hides us from its discoveries; “meaning” is something we expect to find for ourselves, and don’t feel comfortable sharing - lest your meaning turn out to be different from mine. On this view, the humanities matter only insofar as their powers can be conscripted to right wrongs and incite the masses to discontent.
Society has torn down the castles in which eggheads and scribblers once hid away. For funding and upkeep, Intellect has had to become a business - or beg philanthropy. Linking education to pecuniary gain like this is a dangerous gamble. Barzun issues a chilly warning about the now universal practice of borrowing money for a university education. He called this “venture capital for social change,” (200), a practice that would ultimately cement our view of education as merely a financial investment in one’s social mobility. Yet beyond nostalgia for the patronage system of old Europe, he offers no alternatives.
By forcing schools and universities to fend for themselves - and thereby linking them to pecuniary gain - education has become like a business or a factory. Students pay and show up and expect to get something out of it - not just an education, but a life experience. And university administrators - who outnumber the actual professors - are hesitant not to give the students what they paid for. It’s little surprise that enrolments in the humanities around the world are declining, with some universities slashing their departments; the value of humanities was never in its promise of fabulous wealth, but sadly that is what education requires it to offer.
The students suffer too. They are lumped with a big loan that is not always easy to pay off. In New Zealand, most have to work part-time to afford their living costs, which means they aren’t devoting their full attention to their studies. Universities say you should be studying full-time, but most aren’t. It’s one of those fictions we all keep up to invest what we’re doing with some kind of significance beyond dollars.
This has only been exacerbated in the strange age of coronavirus. A “lecture” is now a Zoom call. Each person has their screen turned off, and is too shy to answer questions. They are probably multi-tasking in another window while their bored lecturer reads his slides off verbatim into his webcam.
Some go the next step and try to automate the lecturers away. It’s nice to know that this has always been the case: Barzun lampoons those who believed we could just replace professors with VCRs. Baffling as that sounds, it’s no less silly than the reality for my 11 year old sister today, who is not taught a subject in a classroom, but rather completes a self-directed course of study in an open office (let’s call the “classroom of tomorrow” what it really is). How can a child possibly know what to teach herself? Barzun might see this as another case of the abdication of authority: educators that are too scared to definitively tell their students what they need to know.
The decline of Intellect has made teachers less valuable. They not only have a (relatively) low pay, but also a (relatively) low standing in society. “Research” professors get far less glory than “teaching” professors, with these being seen as two different career paths, rather than two facets of the same thing.
Sure we admire the work of teachers, but we are hardly willing to let them carry it out. They are not only expected to be teachers, but also daycarers, role-models, first-line therapists, social workers, and parent figures. Civil servants and politicians can only alleviate their burdens with more funding, more education, more learning outcomes. If this succeeds, it is only in increasing throughput; the industrial character of education stays the same. “If education were milk we should never imagine that we could increase the supply by adding water… governments expect to buy research and ideas in the same way as it buys soap and chairs.” (204, 206).
Our studies continue to splinter into numerous sub-fields and sub-disciplines, which Barzun called “the gangrene of specialisation”. This temptation replaces the creative work of Intellect with the obsessive-compulsive rhythm of a sewing machine. For while truth draws upon facts, figures, and research, its gaze is ultimately fixed on the interconnected whole. Specialisation, on the other hand, is a kind of pedantry, a morbid anxiety of small error and imprecision:
What critics and specialists do to one another, with all the certitude that a reference library inspires, seems like upholding the standards of accuracy, but in fact accuracy is only tangentially concerned. For accuracy is of the whole as well as of detail, and the fear of error - as against the zeal for truth - yields only a lesser correctness, desirable no doubt, but insufficient and sometimes negligible. (249).
The same mindset governs our speech, conversation, and debates. People are deathly afraid of giving offence or risking a slightly too-narrow claim. Words have all the hard corners smoothed off, so as not to hurt anyone with the sharp ends, or offer any surface for an opponent to grasp.
Barzun gives a humorous example of a train announcement: “Luncheon is being served. Please take your transportation with you.” (237). “Transportation” here means “ticket”, but a more general term was chosen because some people have tickets, some cash, some passes, etc. “Therefore, thinks the pedant, if we say: ‘Take your ticket with you',’ somebody may think ‘I have no ticket,’ and will be unable to carry out the instruction.” (237).
Such writing is not just clumsy, it damages our thoughts. “Depth, surface, unity, technique are not mere aspects of an unchanging core of thought. They are the incarnations of thought itself.” (37). Nowadays we tend to think the opposite, that our words are mere symbolic representations of ideas, which in themselves have no special powers of discovery. I am whole-heartedly with Barzun on this one: writing, both its act and its final shape and form, helps to order our thoughts and settle our minds. Indeed, that’s why I write book reviews.
A modern reader is likely to see The House of Intellect as being in the same vein as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind or Lukianoff and Haidt’s The Coddling of the American Mind. It can be read as an early entry in the culture wars, but its scope is far broader, with Barzun seeing the fate of Intellect linked to the overall trajectory of western civilisation. In this it foreshadows From Dawn Till Decadence.
Barzun sometimes leans on his erudition where more facts or figures would have lent greater substance to his argument. Many of his examples are drawn from personal correspondence or the New York Times. These are too light and specific for the society-wide claims being made, though they are helpful counter-weights to Barzun’s annoying tendency to personify every abstract noun as some great force of history: not just art, philanthropy, or intellect, but Art, Philanthropy, Intellect… I question what the book gained from this kind of framing. It’s not even a useful mnemonic, since a good deal of its content has nothing to do with these.
Barzun’s grumpiness runs away on him. For example, he lambasts how, when the TV show Sunrise Semester invited viewers to read Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, bookstores in New York were “raided” for copies. “Here was a marvelous but difficult, inhospitable book being scrambled for in utter ignorance of its contents.” (13). I struggle to find anything wrong with this. Even if you come to the classics as a matter of intellectual fashion, you still need to take the first step to pick them up and read them.
Other tedious asides overpower his main argument with arcane and snobby hot-takes on aesthetics. For example, in defending the importance of the written form, he claims the Gelehrte style of writing in German “not only hampered its literature, but both the prose and the literature helped ruin German politics and thought.” (244). This mysterious point is never explained; like Barzun’s equally tenuous claim that Latin American instability is due to its marriage of Intellect and politics, it is little more than a distracting caricature.
Yet despite these faults, Barzun is an extremely elegant writer with many profound observations. Intellect, as he describes it, hardly exists anymore - if, indeed, it ever did. Yet he makes a compelling case for it as an ideal, and shows us how precious intellectual life is. In that regard, The House of Intellect is a well-crafted point of comparison with today. Even for 1959, Barzun is something of a delightful anachronism, a telescope into a faraway age of genius and gentleman.